ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that higher education reform in the US is partly the result of changes in state legislatures. Increased regulation appears to be related more to changes in political pressure on legislators than to the actions or needs of the institutions. The chapter focuses on the process of political reform itself. It shows that public universities are clients to legislative patrons, so, too, are legislators clients to other patrons. The chapter suggests that the shift in patronage for legislative clients may cause a concomitant shift in legislators' attitudes and actions when they act as patrons to their public university clients. In the political system state legislatures are the patrons, for they are key players in allocating resources and setting policies that affect the public institutions. Pennsylvania may be seen as a microcosm of the relationship between professionalized, "new political" state systems and the regulation of higher education institutions.
